Kaena: The Prophecy (French: Kaena: La prophétie) is a 2003 French adult animated fantasy adventure film produced by Xilam.
Chris Delaporte started work on the film in 1995 after leaving at Éric Chahi's company Amazing Studio halfway through development of the Studio's only game Heart of Darkness. Originally intended as a video game, the project spun off into a multimedia project.
Kaena was released theatrically in France by BAC Films on June 4, 2003, and was later dubbed into English, with Columbia TriStar Pictures handling US distribution through Destination Films. The English dub features the voices of Kirsten Dunst, Richard Harris (in his last role before his death), Anjelica Huston, Keith David and Ciara Janson. The film received generally negative reviews from critics, who criticized its story, although its animation was praised. The crew did not develop its own software. Instead they used already existing tools like Alienbrain and the 2.5 version of 3ds Max render.
Reception
Kaena was a box office bomb and earned highly negative reviews. The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The L.A. Times and The Boston Globe all said that it was lifeless and dull with an overly convoluted plot. There were unflattering comparisons to a much better-received French animated film, The Triplets of Belleville, and the similarly unsuccessful CG film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 7% based on 30 reviews, with an average rating of 3.90/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Though Kaena: The Prophecy is visually inventive, its story is incoherent, derivative, and dull." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 40 out of 100 based on 15 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
Video game
A video game based on the film, simply titled Kaena, was developed by Xilam and published by Namco for the PlayStation 2 on April 15, 2004. It was released only in Japan in limited quantities, with a completed English localized version being unreleased despite being marketed in North America.